A new report by Forrester Research states that the market for collaboration and productivity web apps in the enterprise (a.k.a. enterprise 2.0) is set for a shake-up, with prices to fall in some cases by over half. Price drops will be especially sharp in blog, wikis, social networking and widgets. The only exception is mashups, which will increase in price over the next 5 years.

Credit crisis. Blah, blah. Cut costs. Blah, blah. Don’t you just love it when you get an alarm call from your hotel at 9.15 when your meeting is at 9.00? At ReadWriteWeb we have been sounding alarms about the economy for a year (here, here, here and here…enough already), suggesting strategies to cope with the coming downturn.

But what about now? This is the time to be audacious. The world has changed, totally and irrevocably. Change is the entrepreneur’s friend.

In July of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Happy Blogiversary,” claiming that it had officially been 10 years since the blog was born. The writer cited Jorn Barger, owner of a site called Robot Wisdom, as the first blogger. After all, it was Barger who first coined the term weblog in 1997, a word that would be later truncated into the monosyllabic blog.

But Scott Rosenberg wasn’t convinced. A co-founder of Salon.com and former technology editor for that site, Rosenberg knew that several online destinations that preceded Barger’s site still met the technical definition of a blog — a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order — including Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Ric Ford’s Macintouch. By the time that Journal article was published, Rosenberg had already been kicking around the idea of writing a book on the history of blogs for some time.

Thankfully, under the Communications Decency Act Web sites can’t be held responsible for comments left on their pages. But can Web sites be forced to divulge their commenters’ IP addresses? Even if anonymous commenters use a site as a soapbox to harrass someone and call them an (actual quote) “cantakerous obnoxious dishonest new money pig self proclaimed god?” No way, says a mostly sensible Oregon court.